London is on Berlin time?

Now let's throw in the FACT that - even right now - Berlin does not have the authority to decide what timezone Stockholm follows, and aliasing Berlin to Stockholm is just plain stupid.

Okay. Let's (for the sake of convenience/accuracy/whatever) call our base timezones "Meridian0" or "Meridian150W" or "Meridian900E" etc. (I've multiplied latitude by 10 so it makes half-hour zones easier - go back to 1800 or so and Bristol would have been "Meridian75W" by that standard...)

Then we have the POLITICAL AUTHORITY that sets summer time - probably the EU that says "Summertime starts last Sunday in March, ends last Sunday in October, at 0100 Meridian150W" - lets call those rules EU-EST.

And lastly we have Sweden/Stockholm that says "base meridian is Meridian150W, Daylight saving is EU-EST, applies 1970 onwards" or whatever.

Then if a country decides to change timezone, eg the UK shifts to European time, we just change Britain/London to say Meridian0 until 2024, Meridian150W from 2025, EU-EST applies from 1970 onwards".

As smurf says, the idiocy is in keying a bunch of TIMEZONE data on a city LOCATION. Which fucks up any other cities that just happen at present to be in the same time zone. Imagine what grief it's going to cause if Britain DOES go onto CET/CEST and tzdb changes our timezone to Berlin ... (or rather, changes Berlin time to London!!!)

Cheers,
Wol

I agree about needing to update tzdb (this is a fact of life in all jurisdictions, since we cannot predict the future), but why would they need to update their settings instead of continuing to use Stockholm like they were already doing? It's not like this tzdata update makes "TZ=Europe/Stockholm" stop working.